Some years ago when The Crank’s Beautiful Girlfriend was still alive, the two of us went down to Ecuador. Our intention was to see the Galapagos Islands, but we also let some travel agent talk us into spending four days in mainland Ecuador, escorted by a private guide.

It turned out that we needed our own guide because the experience was not pleasant. As we soon discovered, Quito is a dangerous place. Even in downtown Quito, we were advised that it was unsafe to cross the street at night. I mean that literally. One night, just as the sun had set, we stepped through the front door of our luxury hotel.

“Where are you going?” the doorman asked.

We pointed to another luxury hotel just across the street, where there was a restaurant we had been told was pretty good.

“I’ll call a taxi for you,” said the doorman.

“But it’s only across the street!”

“It is not safe,” insisted the doorman. He blew his whistle. A taxi pulled up. The doorman held the door open for us.

I thought this was a scam to earn a tip for the doorman and a fare for the taxi. Little by little I became convinced it was something else.

Once we exited the taxi across the street I noticed that the driver waited watchfully until we entered the hotel restaurant on that side. Just as we walked in, he pulled away.

It was the same story on the return trip. Another doorman pleaded with us not to cross the street back to our own hotel, except within the safety of a taxi. And again, the taxi waited until we were inside before driving off.

The super rich get to pay for two armed killers at the door

Then, during a ride through one of Quito’s“nicest” neighborhood, we found ourselves getting driven among the hills above town, past nice-looking but not extraordinary suburban-style houses. Most of the houses had a uniformed armed guard with an automatic rifle standing at the front door. A few houses had two armed guards with automatic weapons.

I asked why a smattering of the houses had two armed guards instead of one,

No, there will be no revolution against them in this country. No chance of the masses rising up and taking control as they did in Egypt and Tunisia.

We eliminated that possibility ourselves when we eliminated the draft. That insured us that instead of having a citizen-soldier army, like the one that refused to fire on their fellow citizens in Egypt, we would have an army loyal to the people who rule – like in Libya. If you mass to protest in a way that will seriously threaten the power structure, you will die in a hail of bullets. Kent State was just a precursor.

Suddenly to be super rich will be to put your life on the line

Instead, what will destroy the quality of life of the super rich will be the cost of attempting to defend themselves from gangs of ambitious thugs who form little fiefdoms led by ruthless and ambitious criminals who kidnap, torture, rob, and kill in order to survive and amass wealth outside of the power structure.

In short, the thugs who are robbing America of our Social Security and Medicare and product safety and education today will live in fear of even bigger thugs tomorrow.

This is how it is these days in most of Mexico, most of Nicaragua, much of El Salvador – in fact in every one of the impoverished Latin American nations where the top few have all the money and power while the people at the bottom struggle desperately to survive. Here’s travel authority Rick Steves talking about it:

The saddest thing about visiting Managua and San Salvador is experiencing the fear caused by the violence that comes with extreme poverty in a big city. Every major hotel and nearly every business has an armed guard. It's unwise to walk around after dark, especially with a big camera. While you're unlikely to be hurt, the risk is that groups of young thugs might just rob you at knifepoint. I found that, rather than whole safe neighborhoods, there were mostly small islands of safety around malls and fancy hotels. A wealthy tourist (and nearly all tourists here are wealthy, in relative terms) happily pays triple for a taxi that works with the hotels so you know you're safe. You generally hop from one safe zone to another by cab.

The future of super wealth in this country will be a future filled with fear of kidnapping. Fear that gangsters will surround your car and shoot your driver, drag you into a truck, chop off your thumb and send it to your family to show that they are truly sincere about wanting all the cash your relatives can put their hands on.

If it's not you who gets kidnapped, then it will be your son. Or your daughter. Or your wife.

Believe me, the “kidnapping tax” rate will be higher than any income tax that any Democrat has ever called for.

Decapitated heads at your font door

Expect to see decapitated private policemen among those who you hired to protect you. Dead guards lying in pools of blood in front of your bullet-riddled front door. Expect to take your daily drive to the office by a different route each day, preferably in a different automobile each day, to confuse those hoping to kidnap you and torture you.

It boils down to often-repeated history: those who sow unreasonably acquisitive greed will reap a whirlpool of blood.

And all when it would be so easy if you simply accepted a marginal tax rate a few points higher than you pay now, rather than demanding a tax cut while you milk the middle class and the poor for their social and medical security, driving them into penury.

In the tiny village of Wingnutia, the people went to the village pump one day. They intended to pump up their daily rations of water from a well that was dug deep into the earth.

But even when they pumped as hard as they could, no water would come out of the pump nozzle. And to make matters worse, they were all were running low on the water they had taken home from the pump a day before.

“That pump needs priming,” declared a passing wise man, who was on his way to the capital to pay his taxes and to observe a few rogues getting impaled on pyramids.

“What is priming?” asked one of the Wingnutians, a dimwit who had never seen a pump primed before.

You pour some water in the top,” explained the wise man. Then when you pump, you create a water seal that in turn creates a vacuum, and that gets the pump functioning again.

“But we’re short of water,” complained the village dimwit. “Why waste water pouring it into the pump?”

“It’s not a waste,” said the wise man. "The process primes the pump, which will bring up water shortly. Then all of y0u will have not only enough to drink, but also extra water to take a bath on Saturday nights before you go to the village witch burning ceremony."

“Oh no you don’t!” growled another suspicious Wingnutian. "We villagers have a water shortage as it is. We’re not wasting any precious water priming any pumps. Instead, we should make drastic cuts in our water usage.”

The Wingnutians drove the wise man out of the village with their sharpened palins, and their lead-heavy bachmans, and a roaring of ryans and a trumpeting of trumps. Then they very gradually drank up the little bit of water they had. When it was gone, they all died of thirst.

Moral: If you refuse to prime the pump, don’t be surprised if you find yourself feeling very, very thirsty.

Second Moral: You've got to spend water to make water. Or something like that.

Third Moral: If you're down to your last glass of water, you might as well enjoy it with your seed corn.

04/19/2011

It's always seemed odd to me that when hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets in early 2003 against going to war in Iraq, we were dismissed by the press as a "fringe element", out of touch with "mainstream America." But when hundred people started yelling at legislators' town hall meetings and adopted a name that has connotations of patriotism, the press and the media fell immediately in love and decided that the teabaggers were a formidable political force. Their adoration of this bunch of ignorant, out-of-work fools fighting for the rights of corporations to screw them over even more, is one of the great hoodwinks of the modern era. That much of this so-called "grassroots energy was (and still is) fueled by Koch Industries money didn't faze them one bit. Chris Matthews and others branded this bunch of lickspittles as the next wave in America, and without asking questions, allowed the Koch brothers to buy themselves elections nationwide, recruiting armies of the dissatisfied to give them cover.

04/18/2011

Rep. Lamar Smith (R – of course) makes this silly argument against gay marriage: “No one can seriously believe that the constitution’s authors intended to create a right to same-sex marriage.”

That’s probably true.

The majority of the Constitution’s authors also probably didn’t believe that non-whites and/or non-landowners had a right to vote or were human beings either. But we didn’t let that constrain American progress, did we?

The Constitution is easily the greatest legal document in world history, but it was not handed down by the Lord Almighty on stone tablets.

(The painting above is not satire, but in fact a seriously intended painting from a conservative. We are doomed.)

How many more examples of tea party racism do we need to discover? Here's an image being circulated by Tea Party Republican and member of the Orange County Republican Party central committee Marilyn Davenport.

The caption? "Now you know why —- No birth certificate!"

The civility meme is still alive, but come on! The tea party is ruled by race-baiting and outright racism. The examples are numerous: racist rally signs, former Tea Party Express chairman Mark Williams publishing racist remarks, tea party leader Dale Robertson brandishing a "niggar" sign, tea party activists shouting "nigger" at a member of Congress, etc, etc. As I've written before, once we dismiss the ridiculous and contradictory political positions as merely cosmetic horseshit, all that's left is white conservative fear of a brown president and a browning nation.

The Pentagon's Chief counsel, Jeh Johnson, and the (snicker) National Black Republican Association keeps insisting that Dr. King, who'd preached and practiced nonviolent opposition throughout his entire life, was actually a closeted Republican and would've been happy to see us go to war with Iraq and Afghanistan. Actual Republicans just loves them dead liberals and Democrats like Dr. King, FDR and President Kennedy when it suits them.

So let's theorize what a Martin Luther King speech would've sounded if all these right wingers and war hawks were right in their daydreaming that Dr. King was one of theirs.

I had a dream.

I had a dream in which godless multinational corporations like Exxon, Halliburton and General Electric would eventually replace nations and political ideologies, a world in which these new nation states would hire Blackwater and other security firms to kill and subjugate the poor and brown who would stand up to them in the name of the Almighty dollar and it was good.

I had a dream in which these brutally, savagely avaricious corporations would lead us to The Promised Land of Iraq's oil fields and untapped trillion dollar mineral deposits of Afghanistan and work in solidarity and brotherhood with our lobbyist-infested Congress as they led us to a new frontier of corporate, industrial profits.

I had a dream, my Republican brothers, in which all men, black or white, yellow or red, male and female, adult and child, poor or middle class, would achieve equality and be subjected to across the board sodomy at the hands of these divine corporations, where a man is judged by his credit history score and not merely the content of his character, I had a dream!

I had a dream, my fellow conservative-Americans, in which the baby Jesus who had also practiced nonviolent opposition, would one day like a juvenile Scientologist cult member be shanghaied, reprogrammed and matured by my evangelical brothers and sisters and armed and militarized to reign supreme over the heathens in the Middle East and Central Asia.

I had a dream in which the First Amendment no longer constrained God Almighty and our armed forces would be properly evangelized, proselytized and churched in direct contravention of the establishment clause and the First Amendment.

I had a dream (Testify, my black Republican brother!) in which the greatness of this country and its most precious resource, the American people, would be sold piece by piece to Asian dictatorships and parted out like an old Ford Edsel, in which a man of education, training and experience could not get a job slinging hash in a fast food restaurant unless he knew the manager and was willing to work nights for minimum wage and no health care benefits.

I had a dream, brothers! I had a dream in which no shiftless, black welfare queen as described to us by our Great Communicator Ronald Reagan, may his soul rest in peace, will ever again drain the national coffers, in which every man, woman and child of all races, all colors, all religions and all creeds save the white and wealthy would have to relearn their frontier survival instincts and fight in alleyways and in dumpsters for scraps of cat food.

I had a dream, brothers and sisters, of a nation that is second to many and first to none, a nation so dumbed down by budget cuts to education and all Americans not in white, Ivy League colleges would have to educate themselves like their forebears, like my Republican brother Abraham Lincoln, who conditionally freed my ancestors and wouldn't've let me vote or let me hold public office.

I had a dream in which corporations would be judged as equals to ordinary American citizens, granted personhood by a misinterpreted Supreme Court ruling, a nation in which no corporation would be judged but by its stock portfolio and not on the content of its character, its morals and ethics and complete lack of a corporeal being.

I had a dream of an America such as this, brothers and sisters. But when I woke up I realized my divine dream had come true and we are in the Promised Land.

Hallelujah! Free at last, free at last, Thank the Lord, we are free at last to starve as men!

01/15/2011

I don't think that you can blame the recent tragedy in Arizona directly on the violent and hateful rhetoric that has been generated by the the right. I also don't think that said rhetoric is above scrutiny and criticism. The violence that we have seen lately is not happening in a vacuum.

July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how "liberals" are "destroying America," walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others.

February 2009: A Marine named Kody Brittingham is arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate President Obama. Brittingham also collected white-supremacist material.

April 2009: A white supremacist named Richard Poplawski opens fire on three Pittsburgh police officers who come to his house on a domestic-violence call and kills all three, because he believed President Obama intended to take away the guns of white citizens like himself. Poplawski is currently awaiting trial.

April 2009: Another gunman in Okaloosa County, Florida, similarly fearful of Obama's purported gun-grabbing plans, kills two deputies when they come to arrest him in a domestic-violence matter, then is killed himself in a shootout with police.

July 2010: An agitated right-winger and convict named Byron Williams loads up on weapons and drives to the Bay Area intent on attacking the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, but is intercepted by state patrolmen and engages them in a shootout and armed standoff in which two officers and Williams are wounded.

September 2010: A Concord, N.C., man is arrested and charged with plotting to blow up a North Carolina abortion clinic. The man, 26-year--old Justin Carl Moose, referred to himself as the "Christian counterpart to (Osama) bin Laden” in a taped undercover meeting with a federal informant.